jebmo’s posthaven

About Essays by Paul Graham:

Paul Graham is a well-known figure in the entrepreneurs’ community. He is the co-founder(along with Jessica Livingston) of the most coveted startup accelerator – Ycombinator. He is also a popular figure in the hacker community. Paul Graham’s insights on startups are unmatched. His articles (called essays) on the same topic are overflowing with wisdom. Honestly, the first time I heard about the essays, I saw the long essays and I was like, “woo, who is going to read all that”. Later, I realized that I could have saved a ton of time if I had read these essays long time ago. These days, I make it a point to re-read some of these essays periodically as a refresher. He has written 179 essays. You should probably read most of them. If you don’t have time to read all of them, here are the top 10 that you should definitely read.

Top 10 Essays by Paul Graham:

1) Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
10.00 MTS score
5578 mentions on twitter
4 mentions on twitter by domain experts

2) How to Get Startup Ideas
10.00 MTS score
5566 mentions on twitter
16 mentions on twitter by domain experts

3) Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
9.99 MTS score
3909 mentions on twitter
12 mentions on twitter by domain experts

4) Startup = Growth
9.99 MTS score
3807 mentions on twitter
11 mentions on twitter by domain experts

5) Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
9.99 MTS score
3080 mentions on twitter
2 mentions on twitter by domain experts

6) How to Make Wealth
9.99 MTS score
2794 mentions on twitter
4 mentions on twitter by domain experts

7) How to Raise Money
9.99 MTS score
2734 mentions on twitter
5 mentions on twitter by domain experts

8) How to Do What You Love
9.99 MTS score
2679 mentions on twitter
3 mentions on twitter by domain experts

9) How Not to Die
9.99 MTS score
2624 mentions on twitter
7 mentions on twitter by domain experts

10) Life is Short
9.99 MTS score
2581 mentions on twitter
8 mentions on twitter by domain experts

Thoughts after reading through them:

Paul Graham is super knowledgeable about startups, no doubt. After reading through each one of them myself, I noticed that the older articles tend to be really long form. In the absence of highlights in his essays, the long articles are impossible to scan visually and sometimes demotivating to read.However, I would recommend you to push through as the insights are valuable. Towards the end of most articles, the insights are very deep. Some short articles such as “Makers schedule vs Managers Schedule” is short and an easy read.

How did I make this top 10 list?

If you follow the right people on twitter, you will get good “new” content. But just because something is new, does not make it the best stuff out there. In order to figure out the best content to read, that I can learn from, I wrote a script that collects the mentions of a link on twitter. Based on these mentions, I score the links out of 10. Showing above are the top 10 links from a chosen website.

I am converting this script into a tool where you can find the top links on any website or get a score of a link (to verify if it is worth your time). If you want to notified of the product when we launch, sign up here